Story 10 - The Spy Who Rocked Too Hard (37🎸)
My main problem here was that I had barely worked with the Irrepressible Blood Chrysanthemum. For , it was a mystery. Which ant that I needed to thoroughly test it! Muahahaha!
I picked up one of the ingredients with my spiritual energy. It had beautiful and long petals, a thin stem, and a few razor-sharp leaves.
Before I started to really get into it, I definitely needed to dissect it first, just to see how it reacted. Then I would look at each individual piece and even turn them into liquid before using a type of alchemy hand seal that used centrifugal force to separate it into different parts. I could then figure out which were necessary to the bath, allowing for fewer impurities.
I could even lt it down or light it on fire. Perhaps dissolving it in various acids would give useful insights. There were just so many beautiful and fun tests I needed to perform!
“Ah, Alchemist Linlin... is it just or is that chrysanthemum trembling in fear?”
I scowled at his interruption.
“What?! That’s nonsense. I was just shaking it a little in my excitent... probably.”
“You were very focused. Did you figure sothing out?” Noxious Fangstrike jumped out of the bath and used a technique to gather all the liquid on his body and in the cauldron before making it vanish.
Inky slithered up to him and wrapped its tail around his leg.
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“Impossible! You must have seen the composition sowhere!”
I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t hard. This was similar to the fertilizer we used at the Indomitable Will sect. Not that I would tell these guys that.
The difference here was that this blend included the bones of a certain spiritual pufferfish. While nutritious and used in so fertilizers for rare plants, these bones had a preservative compound that was harmful to chrysanthemum-type spiritual plants. Basically, it caused this fucking ss.
“The Eight Tears Pufferfish Bones has a preservative harmful to Chrysanthemums. It needs to be removed from your fertilizers for this flower to grow properly. For now, gather most of your leftover seeds, grow them into seedlings, and replant them into a field that doesn’t have remnants of this fish.”
The fact that they went out of their way to collect so many of those bones every year for the past thousand years just to use them on a plant that didn’t need them... What a fucking tragedy. Shit like this always happened when an older generation passed away without leaving proper notes or inheritance.
The gardeners stared at with devastated expressions.
“No! I don’t believe it!” The old man fell to his knees and shoved his hands into the soil. “I can’t! If I do then that ans… that ans…”
He coughed up several mouthfuls of blood.
“Senior!” The little gardeners gathered around their elder and a few helped him inside while the second oldest stayed behind.
With this, I’d solved the Irrepressible Blood Chrysanthemum issue as best as I could.
I made my way back down the mountain toward Noxious Fangstrike’s alchemy room. Considering that they needed to regrow the flowers from fucking scratch, my hopes for a quick solution to Little Spring’s problem were swiftly dying. Creating a full cure for Little Spring would definitely take more than two weeks.
After Noxious Fangstrike told the remaining horticulturist to follow my instructions exactly, he followed after . He had this blank look on his face as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. His expression scrunched into a pained grimace.
“So, this whole ti, we’ve been mildly poisoning the plant that was the backbone of our sect?”
“I did say that your sect is infected with stupid.”
He stopped for a mont, covered his eyes, and breathed out to steady himself. “Wait! What about the years they couldn’t find the fish bones to add to the fertilizer? Wouldn’t they have realized that there was sothing wrong with the formula they were using?”
“If you stop giving soone poison, will it still remain in their body?”
“Of course!”
“Well, the field had already been poisoned so badly that the flowers couldn’t recover. Then these idiots likely found the fish bones the next year or two later. But it wasn’t long enough for it to clear out of the flower’s roots. ”
“So this whole ti?”
“You’ve been doing it to yourselves. Just like with the pepper.”
“I almost wish it had been those demonic bastards.”
“Nah, they would have moved faster than a thousand years. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they already know about this and have prevented your sect from learning how to fix things.”
“But the Irrepressible Blood Chrysanthemums aren’t going to recover in the next month. Will we still be able to find a fix for the bath?”
“It’s not ideal, but we can still use the doubling-up thod your seniors ca up with. But we’ll have to find a way to purify the flower, preferably one that doesn’t use an extra mint plant that just adds more impurities to it. ”
He nodded.
“Does this an our bath is... fixed? At least soon to be?”
“Who said that?”
“What? Don’t we rely need to wait for the new Chrysanthemums?”
I turned toward him and looked directly into his gold eyes. “Even with the cured flowers, your bath is still considered an unorthodox thod of beast contracting.”
“So what? We’re unorthodox cultivators. Why should we care what so righteous sects have to say about us?”
This was a problem. And not just because I needed him to keep funding my research. “Senior, what do you think will happen when the demonic cults go to war with the unorthodox sects?”
He lifted his chin proudly. “We’d join each other to fight against them.”
“What if the attacks are tid so well that you’d have to turn to the righteous sects for help?”
His face turned grim. “That’s not likely to occur.”
“You don’t know them like I do. They absolutely would sche up sothing like this. Because they understand that the orthodox sects won’t send reinforcents.”
He nodded. “They wouldn’t. They’d instead be glad because there would be one less unorthodox sect nearby.”
“As a once rogue cultivator who is now tied to this place.” Thanks to Little Spring and his goddamn normal not-puppy. “I don’t want this sect to be destroyed.”
He chuckled. “Now that we have a fix for the bath and we’ll have a cure soon, we aren’t going anywhere. Besides, the demonic cultivators are more likely to make trouble with the righteous sects.”
I needed this guy to see the danger this place was in so he could understand why we had to make the baths align closer to the orthodox thods. All for one brat.
But I also wasn’t wrong. I’d seen this horrible shit happen in my past life. And I had cursed the original author a billion tis for writing that war into his goddamn plot.
“Then, let’s say in the future, the demonic cult gives the righteous sects no choice but to band together and defeat them once and for all.”
He chuckled. “That would be great. It would get them off our back and focused on each other.”
This short-sighted... “What makes you think they’ll leave us alone?”
At least he wasn’t dumb, which I knew because his eyes darkened with realization. “They wouldn’t, because they all erroneously believe that we’re working with those demonic bastards.”
“Exactly. If we want this place to grow and survive, it will need to make alliances with the orthodox sects, and one step to go about doing that would be to make your beast taming bath so flawless they’ll have no choice but to accept it as orthodox and your sect as an ally. Which could be a bridge to bring the other unorthodox sects over.” I paused and glared at him. “And another thing you can do to help would be to start making friendships with orthodox sects instead of antagonizing them.”
“We don’t antagonize them.”
Fucking liar. Unfortunately, I couldn’t call him out on it because I was undercover.
“They antagonize us. We just fight back.”
“...” Whatever, I didn’t have ti to argue. “But what I’m getting at is—”
“You want to keep improving the bath and you want to pay for it.”
“Senior. It would only benefit the sect.”
He narrowed his eyes at . “Fine.”
Yes! Investor get!
“With the way your mind so easily looks at the larger picture of the continent’s dynamics, it makes think you have a desire to be our sect leader in the future.”
“If I have to stop doing my experints to take care of the day-to-day minutiae of this sect, I would rather you kick out.”
No one was trapping in a place where I had to do paperwork for more than twelve hours a day! Not anymore! I would fight tooth and nail before I let that happen again.
That said, with this sect’s leader in closed door cultivation, who was handling everything? It didn’t appear to be this asshole or Pearlescent Rose.
Well, whatever. It shouldn’t matter to or my tasks. Because now that I had confirmation on what made the chrysanthemums have half the spiritual energy they should, I could move forward with my plans to fix the bath. It wouldn’t even be that hard.
No, the difficult part would co after, when I had to start developing an actual cure for those who had already undergone the contract bath.
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